we’ve all got problems

we’ve all got problems

she gets on the bus
with her kid
she’s wearing a hostess outfit
and a gray hat
the kind that fidel castro likes

she’s talking to her daughter
about some bully in school
who punched the child
in the face.

the kid might be five.

this has happened three times
this week
and no one told her about
the assaults
until today, she says

and, look, you have a black eye too, she says,
holding her child’s face and examining it
until she realizes she’s missed their stop
and the bus has to pull over
three blocks beyond where they needed.

we’ve all got problems, i think,
watching the woman and her battered child
haul ass off the bus

she’s got a bully to deal with
and probably a shit job
in a bad restaurant
and a child to care for on one salary

others have death and debt
and everything else to deal with.

me?

right now my knees are jammed on this bus
and i can’t get my fat ass
on just one of these plastic bus seats.
the bus driver has pulled over on a green light
to have a smoke break
because he’s union and he can.

not too bad and not too good either

but i’m probably going
to have to start
laying off the beer
sooner rather than later
try and get some of this weight down
before the new year arrives.

--John Grochalski is the author of The Noose Doesn't Get Any Looser After You Punch-Out. His extensive publishing credits include appearing at Calliope Nerve, Avenue, Thieves Jargon, The Lilliput Review, The New Yinzer, The Blue Collar Review, The Deep Cleveland Junkmail Oracle, The ARTvoice, Modern Drunkard Magazine, The American Dissident, My Favorite Bullet, Words-Myth, The Main Street Rag, Underground Voices, Eclectica, Zygote In My Coffee, the Kennesaw Review, Octopus Beak Inc., Re)Verb, Clockwise Cat, Ink Sweat and Tears, Cherry Bleeds, Indite Circle, Lit Up, Gloom Cupboard, One Night Stanzas, American Tanka, Tattoo Highway, Lit Up, Ghoti, The Smoking Poet, Why Vandalism, The Delinquent, Delirio, The Chiron Review, Gutter Eloquence, Opium Poetry, Mad Swirl, Deep Tissue Magazine, The Loch Raven Review, The Hidden City Quarterly, Poetic Desperation, Red Fez, Eviscerator Heaven, Viral Cat, Leaf Garden, Alternative Reel, Rusty Truck, Poetry Super Highway, the Orange Room Review, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Fictionville, Bartleby Snopes, Retort, The Battered Suitcase, The Big Stupid Review, Pequin, and The Legendary. His column The Lost Yinzer appears quarterly in The New Yinzer (www.newyinzer.com).

READ-WRITE

READ-WRITE

Steaming gash-
It is me
Swimming like a duck
Dodging mosquitoes
In a hell
Beyond money,
A sort of infinite stone
Absent with sleep
Monsoon
Heap

--RC Miller currently lives in Metuchen, New Jersey and at http://visionblues.blogspot.com/.

Brail

From Michael McAloran's In The Black Cadaver Light:

Brail

a blind mans cane searches through
eternal dark

I can see my reflection

in your eyes

death you seek in me to strike some
way out as I hunger

your flesh stretches out before me
like brail

echoing laughter echos from the
carnival

the children, harvest of the future
sleep peacefully

tonight

I drain another bottle
sucking down life

as a dying man sucks down
death

all the while thinking only
of the possibilities

of abscence

Quoteable

"When the chips are down, these...the civilized people will eat each other. See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve." --The Joker (Batman: The Dark Knight movie)

i thought i saw her

i thought i saw her

i thought i saw her
that ruinous blonde whore
that tight assed wench
who never wore underwear
that little strumpet

i thought i saw her
walking down broadway
with a group of friends
looking in the holiday store windows

she was wearing
a white coat
and except for a few wrinkles
around the eyes
she looked the same as back then

i thought i saw her
that fucking bitch
that demon of so many nights
the one who gave her cunt
so quickly
and took it away

and it was like 1997 all over again
and i felt the shame
of not being able to get it up
of sneaking around with her
behind my friend’s back

i thought i saw her
that tiny liar
who told me that she was twenty
when she was barely eighteen
who might’ve been fucking someone else

behind my back

i thought i saw her
i wondered how she and i
could be on the same street
twelve years later
hundreds of miles ago

it didn’t seem possible
she never really existed anyway
just a figment of my imagination
like all of the rest of them

but i thought i saw her
right by the comic book store
right by the billiards joint
and the bar i never go into
because the drinks cost too much

i thought i saw her
that slut
that napoleon of the heart
that bin laden of the soul
that small titted vlad the impaler
i thought i saw her
on broadway

but, shit,
broadway is so busy this time
of year
it very well could’ve been
someone that just
looked like her.

--John Grochalski is the author of The Noose Doesn't Get Any Looser After You Punch-Out. His extensive publishing credits include appearing at Calliope Nerve, Avenue, Thieves Jargon, The Lilliput Review, The New Yinzer, The Blue Collar Review, The Deep Cleveland Junkmail Oracle, The ARTvoice, Modern Drunkard Magazine, The American Dissident, My Favorite Bullet, Words-Myth, The Main Street Rag, Underground Voices, Eclectica, Zygote In My Coffee, the Kennesaw Review, Octopus Beak Inc., Re)Verb, Clockwise Cat, Ink Sweat and Tears, Cherry Bleeds, Indite Circle, Lit Up, Gloom Cupboard, One Night Stanzas, American Tanka, Tattoo Highway, Lit Up, Ghoti, The Smoking Poet, Why Vandalism, The Delinquent, Delirio, The Chiron Review, Gutter Eloquence, Opium Poetry, Mad Swirl, Deep Tissue Magazine, The Loch Raven Review, The Hidden City Quarterly, Poetic Desperation, Red Fez, Eviscerator Heaven, Viral Cat, Leaf Garden, Alternative Reel, Rusty Truck, Poetry Super Highway, the Orange Room Review, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Fictionville, Bartleby Snopes, Retort, The Battered Suitcase, The Big Stupid Review, Pequin, and The Legendary. His column The Lost Yinzer appears quarterly in The New Yinzer (www.newyinzer.com).

Quoteable

"Are you a lucky little lady in the city of light?
Or just another lost angel." --The Doors

this happens

this happens

i see her looking down at me
while she’s waiting
for the train doors to open
then she leans down
and asks me what’s that book
i’m reading
at first i say nothing
i look up at her
she looks alien to me
ugly and grotesque
i cannot recognize her as human
she says i only ask
because i really like the book’s
cover, it’s so vibrant
then i look down at the book
in my hands
i turn it over
and it looks alien too
only not as ugly and grotesque
as the woman
at least it’s tangible
then i say
it’s poetry
a book of poetry
and her face drops
oh, she says
well how is it?
bad, i say
then the train doors open
and as she steps out onto the platform
i close the book
put it back in my bag
lean my head against the window
and wait for however long
it’ll take
until the next one comes by
and has something to say

--John Grochalski is the author of The Noose Doesn't Get Any Looser After You Punch-Out. His extensive publishing credits include appearing at Calliope Nerve, Avenue, Thieves Jargon, The Lilliput Review, The New Yinzer, The Blue Collar Review, The Deep Cleveland Junkmail Oracle, The ARTvoice, Modern Drunkard Magazine, The American Dissident, My Favorite Bullet, Words-Myth, The Main Street Rag, Underground Voices, Eclectica, Zygote In My Coffee, the Kennesaw Review, Octopus Beak Inc., Re)Verb, Clockwise Cat, Ink Sweat and Tears, Cherry Bleeds, Indite Circle, Lit Up, Gloom Cupboard, One Night Stanzas, American Tanka, Tattoo Highway, Lit Up, Ghoti, The Smoking Poet, Why Vandalism, The Delinquent, Delirio, The Chiron Review, Gutter Eloquence, Opium Poetry, Mad Swirl, Deep Tissue Magazine, The Loch Raven Review, The Hidden City Quarterly, Poetic Desperation, Red Fez, Eviscerator Heaven, Viral Cat, Leaf Garden, Alternative Reel, Rusty Truck, Poetry Super Highway, the Orange Room Review, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Fictionville, Bartleby Snopes, Retort, The Battered Suitcase, The Big Stupid Review, Pequin, and The Legendary. His column The Lost Yinzer appears quarterly in The New Yinzer (www.newyinzer.com).

Quoteable

"I plead
Just let me feel some ease
From creatures of your greed
Just let me feel some ease for me

I'm not so glad I met to
It makes me wanna go away" --Filter

no-one else

From Michael McAloran's In The Black Cadaver Light:

no-one else

the axe glints in the night
never our dying our undying need

our shadows close around us
black death like tar to choke the veins
and steal the pulse

burnt plastic smoke
a stench of light

and the curling flesh in the depths of
all that is sacred

we fade out, in an electrical sense of abscence
your body convulses

I slide out of my chair and fall to ground to
vomit my clarity into empty space

I am strangled

the nude moons dalliance with the wolves
glimmers with vague appeal

yet nothing will change us
nothing will change

the hideousness of our rapture
is for us and us alone

it is a theatre
to which no-one else is invited

drunk and looking at high school yearbooks

drunk and looking at high school yearbooks

“you’re not in this book at all,”
she said.
“only the graduation picture.”
“who’s that?”
“i don’t remember his name,
i just know that i hated him,”
i said.
“and him?”
“the same.”
“must’ve been weird going to
school without girls,”
she said.
“i didn’t mind it. it was one
less group to torment me.”
“but still.”
“but still.”
“you’re really not in here
at all,” she said.
“no. i made no impression
whatsoever,” i said.
“but, like, not even in a group
shot, or a hallway photo,
nothing.”
i took the yearbook from her
and studied it closely.
“i wasn’t the kind of guy the school
wanted representing their past
or the future.”
“why?”
“boys of privilege over boys
just trying to get by. it would
look bad.”
“i guess.”
“it’s true,” i said.
she took the yearbook back
and we turned to the senior pictures.
“oh, there you are!” she said.
i looked at the photo. he had my
name, but didn’t look at damn thing
like me.
“yes,” i answered. “that must be me.”
she laughed. “what’s with the hair?”

--John Grochalski is the author of The Noose Doesn't Get Any Looser After You Punch-Out. His extensive publishing credits include appearing at Calliope Nerve, Avenue, Thieves Jargon, The Lilliput Review, The New Yinzer, The Blue Collar Review, The Deep Cleveland Junkmail Oracle, The ARTvoice, Modern Drunkard Magazine, The American Dissident, My Favorite Bullet, Words-Myth, The Main Street Rag, Underground Voices, Eclectica, Zygote In My Coffee, the Kennesaw Review, Octopus Beak Inc., Re)Verb, Clockwise Cat, Ink Sweat and Tears, Cherry Bleeds, Indite Circle, Lit Up, Gloom Cupboard, One Night Stanzas, American Tanka, Tattoo Highway, Lit Up, Ghoti, The Smoking Poet, Why Vandalism, The Delinquent, Delirio, The Chiron Review, Gutter Eloquence, Opium Poetry, Mad Swirl, Deep Tissue Magazine, The Loch Raven Review, The Hidden City Quarterly, Poetic Desperation, Red Fez, Eviscerator Heaven, Viral Cat, Leaf Garden, Alternative Reel, Rusty Truck, Poetry Super Highway, the Orange Room Review, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Fictionville, Bartleby Snopes, Retort, The Battered Suitcase, The Big Stupid Review, Pequin, and The Legendary. His column The Lost Yinzer appears quarterly in The New Yinzer (www.newyinzer.com).

No Blood, No Bandage

No Blood, No Bandage

 
 She ruins my skin, my sleep.
 Provokes my mental health,
 I am livid (with her, and I will lose every power struggle). 
  
--Frances Luatriste lives in the suburbs of Toronto with two kitties. She blogs at mirrorandmoon.livejournal.com

the legions

From Michael McAloran's In The Black Cadaver Light:

the legions

to stretch

to curve
to fuck over again

the flesh unravels
a coil unleashed

you vomit in the latrine, as
I ejaculate

my darling
how could this be

anywhere else
but love

or hell?

I am grinning with luminous teeth
in tthe dark

my darling

I can taste the legions of
our death

The Rotten, Pickled, Fish-Eyes and the Women Who Loved Them... A Screaming Jerry Springer Love-Fest

The Rotten, Pickled, Fish-Eyes and the Women Who Loved Them... A Screaming Jerry Springer Love-Fest

"Don't show 'em yer hootenanny!!!" screamed a highly ed-u-cafied, hillbilly lady..., a compromisational creative medium met me medium way to the shape of a block on the merry, march towards death, we the creative hop and skip towards perception minus less than abstract creative contractions..., the death of creative inquiry is all around..., ego-encouraged movements should not be permitted to use artificial transportations..., I need a holster for my notebooks, for I write wild smoke and light-beams...

--Eric J. Brinovec is a 28 year old man from Grants, NM. Eric has been published in Ygdrasil, Poetrywarrior, and Purdee. He loves the Meat Puppets and wants to finally do something with his life and succeed enough to get away from this intellectually dead, western town of zombies...

FROTH

FROTH

You are grateful
God takes your daughter
To where she may recline
And call forth His fruit in abundance
So that she may drink

Hell is where I burn
Since I disbelieve
In your daughter and in God
And I call forth my own fruit
So that I may drink

I talk it sweet talk and
I spend my pursuits thinking the whiteboard is white
Associate my smell
With brand names or the shape of a product's box
Most of me travels on my belly

I churn the idleness within myself
And call forth in abundance my own declining rank
Since I disbelieve in burning or in fruit
This costly worship is severe indeed
All the world spirals toward a beautiful void

--RC Miller currently lives in Metuchen, New Jersey and at http://visionblues.blogspot.com/.

Vipers

From Michael McAloran's In The Black Cadaver Light:

Vipers

cold shadow of dark wind

take me naked

the sound is guttering in my
star-lit eyes

come take me naked

the blood is railing in my flesh

take me naked there

my hands like vipers

come take me naked

Just Remember to Translate Your Hand Movements Into Square-Shaped Objects

Just Remember to Translate Your Hand Movements Into Square-Shaped Objects

Just call me grandmaster depression..., a master of impressive depressive twitchings, that's what I am..., I was locked in a dark room with myself, and I wouldn't compromise, so I kicked myself out..., I didn't get along with myself... a lightning bolt is getting the shit kicked out of it by some rogue moonlight flying in the window..., so I put some glue on it and let it continue to fly in..., It had carved it's own little landing-strip into my floor as I crawled over for a better look..., the moonlight reminds me that I wanna look back..., but when I percieve it again, I want it to be something better, I want to see my life boiling in a bath of colder pain...

--Eric J. Brinovec is a 28 year old man from Grants, NM. Eric has been published in Ygdrasil, Poetrywarrior, and Purdee. He loves the Meat Puppets and wants to finally do something with his life and succeed enough to get away from this intellectually dead, western town of zombies...

Cup and Angel

Cup and Angel

The desk was black glass and supported a cup of whiskey that Daniel knocked over as he moved his left arm towards his right, rising out of his chair. The cup clicked when it hit the glass, spilling its contents along the edge.

An angel came down to Daniel and said, "Daniel."

Daniel looked and saw pure light. The angel's voice was that of his father.

"Daniel."

"What are you?"

"You call us angels."

Daniel couldn't move or speak. The whiskey from the cup was falling over his desk and gathering on the floor. The angel put the liquor back into the cup and stood it upright again. Daniel watched from behind his body as he swung the same arm in the same arc and toppled the cup again.

"Oh God. That's me," he said, "I'm over there."

"No, Daniel. You are here."

"That's my body."

"Are you your body?"
       
Daniel turned to the angel and was blinded. He fell to the ground and cried into the darkness.

"Angel! Help me."

"Close your eyes, Daniel."

He closed his eyes and saw. He saw every paint stroke on the white wall above his desk. He held his hands up and stared into his veins. Daniel turned to the angel and saw. It was a tall thing, and its wings were alabaster, wide and strong. Daniel saw no face, no eyes or mouth. There were only the wings. He thought the wings to be the source of the overwhelming light. They looked like white suns.
       
The angel returned the cup to its hopeful state and again Daniel struck it down. The desk shook no differently than it had twice before, then three and four times. The whiskey pooled no deeper.

"Why are you doing this?" the Angel asked.
     
"Me?"

"You, Daniel."
   
"You're setting the cup back in time or sending it back, whatever it is. You're doing this."

"No, Daniel. You are the cup. You have fallen at your own hand."

Daniel kept his eyes closed. He looked into the cup and saw his being in its entirety. He saw every second of the forty-two years he had spent living. He saw mother.

#

Marianne was standing at a lectern, looking into an old church that had been converted to the meeting center for the outcasts of Los Angeles. She spoke to group of five and thirty gathered in rows of steel folding chairs. Daniel was six, but he had a maturity that all children of alcoholics must have. Sitting in the back next to a man named Lot who reeked of rum, he listened to his mother give the same speech she gave every time she showed up.

"We cannot allow this disease to take our children or our families. We must fight for the ones we love."

Someone in the front shouted, "Amen!" and Marianne said, "I don't need an Amen. I need a drink."

Her sideshow congregation laughed and she walked away and sat down next to Daniel. The ring leader returned to center stage and began the closing. In ritualistic fashion, a cup of water was passed from chair to chair so that every member could drink the unchanged liquid and know that it didn't have to be the way it was. They were wrong. It had to be the way it was. Daniel had figured out the way everything would be when the cup reached his mother and he knocked it from her hands.

"Daniel, you are the cup," she said, transforming into an angel. The church echoed the metamorphosis, turning from shrine to flat, the chairs from steel to plastic, and the lectern from black wood to black glass.

Daniel stood and knocked the cup over again. He walked on his original course to the kitchen to pick up a knife. He faced the blade toward himself and stabbed it at the bottom of his jaw, into his neck. But the angel put the blood back.

--Clay Heller enjoys the works of Vladimir Nabokov and the music of The National.

Howie Good's Ghosts of Breath Press Release w/Preview

THE DAUGHTERS OF MAN

I’m high up on a ladder that’s noisily being circled by ravens and crows. Somewhere below, my daughters have exchanged names. I call to the younger one, but the older one answers. I should’ve known this is what happens when you marry late. They laugh at my confusion and then head off through the trees. It isn’t that they don’t love me; it’s just that they love other things more. I begin to climb down. I’m halfway to the ground before I ever notice the man in the skeleton mask pacing at the bottom.



For Immediate Release---

Bedouin Books is proud to announce the publication of poet Howie Good's, Ghosts of Breath: pamphlet poets series no.2.

"Howie Good's poems consist of epitaphs and epigrams that build into tiny tomes. his tonal exhalations at once fasten the reader on an image, but as in meditation, the
image is abandoned. read these poems not as abstractions or epitomes, but as a focus on the breath. if you don't want these poems to end, read them again; they are treatments for the next inhalation chased by ellipses ... ghosts of breath."

The original series of Ghosts of Breath was nominated for Best of the Web.

Howie Good is a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is the author of eleven previous poetry chapbooks, including Still Life
with Firearms (2009) from Right Hand Pointing, Visiting the Dead (2009) from Flutter Press, and My Heart Draws a Rough Map (2009) from the Blue Hour Press. He has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and four times for the Best of the Net anthology. His first full-length book of poetry, Lovesick, was released in 2009 by Press Americana.

Bedouin Books' pamphlet poets series is an ongoing poetry project featuring emerging and established poets working in a myriad of forms and styles in the milieu of this second millennium. the books in the series are:

no. 1 | Paris Oratories, by M.D'Alessandro - a long poem for love and war

no. 2 | Ghosts of Breath, by Howie Good

no. 3 | Caspian Quilt, by Audri Sousa - to be released this winter

Here's what people are saying about Ghosts of Breath...

"Good's work makes me sad with a smile. There is mystery enough in his vivid imagery to make me continue to wonder about his world after I've finished reading. There is clarity enough in his poignant work to remind me of things I have maybe never known but always wanted to forget. 'Dog Years' and 'Giant Killer' are two of the best poems I have read in three years as an editor." --Amy Lynn Hess - Gypsy Daughter

"I don't know an American poet with a richer imagination than Howie Good, who has been publishing extensively recently online and in print. Howie's images and language are both beautiful and despairing and many of the poems are like nightmares proclaimed by an increasingly urgent prophet." --Dale Wisely – Right Hand Pointing

Bedouin Books publishes hand-made works of literature and poetry / fiction and non-fiction with letterpress printed covers. Bedouin Books publishing philosophy is to give emerging writers legitimate quality collections in bound form as a springboard to the careers, publishing credit,
as well as something they can sell.

Please visit www.bedouinbooks.com for more information and order a copy of Ghosts of Breath today. Also available at: Amazon.com.

Mixed Messages in the Sky

Mixed Messages in the Sky

Individuality was encircled by modes of coded colors and encryption, they defied the white man's description of Egyption crypts..., I breathed a burp of hatred on Legoland..., severed legs begged to re-unite, attach, and belong again..., all the parts needed to belong to a whole... golden-haired plungers lunged at the idea of merging into the shape of a rubber skyscraper, I gazed at the strangely visible, glazed prayers wandering about, and then I read the purple message in the sky...

--Eric J. Brinovec is a 28 year old man from Grants, NM. Eric has been published in Ygdrasil, Poetrywarrior, and Purdee. He loves the Meat Puppets and wants to finally do something with his life and succeed enough to get away from this intellectually dead, western town of zombies...

Cruel but Usual

Cruel but Usual

There is no better feeling than being alone, the male spinster thought as the wound bubbled over. For a second he felt that someone was rubbing his shoulder, but it was only the breeze from an open window.

He opened his eyes and realized his situation. Panic inversely erupted from him like ants returning to their hole with remnants of spilled cotton candy.

His right hand covered the left, only to realize this forced the right into a worse situation. Before thinking he twisted his arms into a pretzel and held them over his head. Life weeped over him.

A voice entered his ears from somewhere outside.

“One day we’re going to find our way out of here,” it said. “My footprints are killing the grass.”

He followed the voice, hands above his head, out into the wooded dusk. Stay calm, he told himself. Breathing only gets hard when you think about it.

He followed the lilting echo of the words down a path bordered by a stream. He hadn’t looked in a mirror in weeks and the water showed him someone who had passed away a long time ago.

The path led him to an open field, where she was digging in the soil. Covering a seedling. She looked up and smiled.

“I named it Heaven.”

She turned back to the rifled dirt and spoke through the soil, to the tiny life below.

“You’ll be here forever, long after I’ve forgotten. But I promise to be buried next to you. You’ll be as close as I’ll ever get to the sky.”

She closed her eyes and took the moment in.

“I hope we never get out of here,” he interrupted. “We’d have no idea what to do.”

She looked back to him, lugubriously. He spoke in a voice that made you want to clear your throat.

“Our lives are grease in the machine. We’re not ready to be a wheel.”

--Peter Driscoll is currently seeking an MFA in Creative Writing.

Suddenly the Light

Suddenly the Light

Suddenly the light decreed uprising
like a certainty
the blue mountains accepted.
Golden eagle feathers spread
above the spears
like a sage whispers tidings of distance
to the emperor.
Clear rivers fill crystal glasses,
you climbed on my wrist
like a hunting bird
and we feasted together.
We rested and confessed,
I savored your readings and teachings
from the rain damaged book.
And like a willow the light grew thine,
making me stronger
and making you true.

--John Swain lives in Louisville, Kentucky. His work has appeared in Flutter, ditch, Gloom Cupboard, Counterexample Poetics, Rust and Moth, Word Catalyst Magazine and others.

The New Normal

The New Normal

For the stewards of our economy

Got a pink slip for Christmas
I’m hardly the only one
Working graveyard at the minimart now
A bad job’s better than none

Poverty’s the new normal

Methinks
The new normal stinks

Sold our house at a loss
All our stuff’s on one rented floor
Dine with friends at McDonald’s
Not that late great steakhouse next door

Poverty’s the new normal

Always short of bucks
The new normal sucks

Gave the kids homemade Christmas gifts
Not the toys they saw on TV
They won’t have TV next Christmas
If this mess is a recovery

Poverty’s the new normal

If it’s not too bold
I can’t wait till the new normal gets old

--Robert Laughlin lives in Chico, California. He is the creator of the Micro Award, an annual competition for previously published flash fiction. Two of his short stories are MWA Notable Stories, and his first novel, Vow of Silence, is available from Trytium.

Nick Percival talks about his steampunk fairytale Legends

Nick Percival talks about his steampunk fairytale Legends.

Quoteable

"...from the sky, from the Earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web. ...We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it." --Pablo Picasso

I Wanted to Burst With Ballads

I Wanted to Burst With Ballads

I want to burst with ballads but you left your balcony
I'll continue anyway, talk to the birds that stayed
To hear my song, sung lung strong, nay; screamed
With love that streams with excitement.  Frightening
And electric, practically pulsing with an unnamed joy.

I'll describe my ride up your thighs where I'll lie in perfect harmony
Keep it clean, if you please, or your mind will find me foul
I merely want to match the softness of your skin with the softest of mine
Feel the heat beat warm; not burning, alluring and soft.  So soft.
Glide along tone lines in hopes to hide in you forever, if you'll have me.

          Now sing a chorus birds, and rouse her!
          Sing it loud and shake the walls that house her!
          Sing that chorus birds, sing a song to rouse her!
          Sing it loud and shake the walls that house her!

Yours eyes, so bright, will shine alight tonight
And dance to glance at open hands tonight.
They wait to make a moment break, tonight
Who's scream unseen will seem supreme tonight;
When light explodes and love unfolds tonight.

The smoke has all settled and now the streets are dim
I like to hold your hand while we are watching them
In reverie, inebriation; they've pleasantly chosen their station
I love to watch your friends, but just when you're around
They bring a certain life back to this dreary town.

--Matthew Mumford is a New England native who spent the majority of his childhood traveling the east coast of the United States. This gave him an early wanderlust and curiosity about the world around him. His writing stays true to his New England roots, as he describes the world he sees in his travels.

she never knew

she never knew

how
good
she looked
blonde hair
in wet strings
her ass
wrapped
in a tight
brown
skirt
her face red
with anger
that little
bitch
she never knew
how
good
she looked
slamming my door
and
walking out
of my life
forever

--John Grochalski is the author of The Noose Doesn't Get Any Looser After You Punch-Out. His extensive publishing credits include appearing at Calliope Nerve, Avenue, Thieves Jargon, The Lilliput Review, The New Yinzer, The Blue Collar Review, The Deep Cleveland Junkmail Oracle, The ARTvoice, Modern Drunkard Magazine, The American Dissident, My Favorite Bullet, Words-Myth, The Main Street Rag, Underground Voices, Eclectica, Zygote In My Coffee, the Kennesaw Review, Octopus Beak Inc., Re)Verb, Clockwise Cat, Ink Sweat and Tears, Cherry Bleeds, Indite Circle, Lit Up, Gloom Cupboard, One Night Stanzas, American Tanka, Tattoo Highway, Lit Up, Ghoti, The Smoking Poet, Why Vandalism, The Delinquent, Delirio, The Chiron Review, Gutter Eloquence, Opium Poetry, Mad Swirl, Deep Tissue Magazine, The Loch Raven Review, The Hidden City Quarterly, Poetic Desperation, Red Fez, Eviscerator Heaven, Viral Cat, Leaf Garden, Alternative Reel, Rusty Truck, Poetry Super Highway, the Orange Room Review, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Fictionville, Bartleby Snopes, Retort, The Battered Suitcase, The Big Stupid Review, Pequin, and The Legendary. His column The Lost Yinzer appears quarterly in The New Yinzer (www.newyinzer.com).

Pull 17

From Gail Gray's Planetary Tensions:

Pull 17

Feel the pull,
as if the gravity of meaning, the gravity
of galaxies light years traveled
lured you from your safely shaped life;
refused “no” for an answer
offered no quarter to distractions, evasions,
escape. At first an invitation to
participation mystique
but the yawn is needy for spokesmen
and heralds of transcendence. The universal tug
wins, the house fixed by the planets you
chose at birth.

Collective man must have a voice,
dispersing your personal desires
as if scattering marbles. The hand on
your shoulder, snaking into your mind
is the spirit fed on the lives of your
influences. As society crumbles
the summons becomes louder, crueler,
keener. You may attempt to elude, but
night wakenings, day nightmares pursue
in packs, teeth eager for tendons…
all for the benefit of those unequipped.
You…sacrificed upon humanity’s steps…
divine device…cued
to hear, interpret the whispers.

--Gail Gray is the author of three books of poetry, The Hazard of Waking Up, Spirals in Copper, and Planetary Tensions with Eye on the Universe upcoming from Differentia Press and Storms at the Edge upcoming from Virgogray Press. She is the owner of Shadow Archer Press and editor of Fissure, a magazine of experimental art and writing. Her poetry has been published or is upcoming in The Asheville Poetry Review, Counterexample Poetics, Cokefish, Exquisite Corpse, Eviscerator Heaven, Being, Big Swollen Toe, Sisyphus, Zygote Abstract Libertine, Gloom Cupboard, Main Street Rag, sein und werden, Clockwise Cat, Shoots and Vines, ditch, Deep Tissue, Troubadour 21, Anastomoo, and Full of Crow.

Pop Culture Fried in Lard-Soaked Breadcrumbs

Pop Culture Fried in Lard-Soaked Breadcrumbs

I watched the plastic dummies flail and melt in the fiery crash..., their constructed looks of molded distress impressed me. Realistic expression pressed on to plastic dummy faces, brushed moving comets in the winds of stronger winds sent out by angry storms..., ready-made personalities are mass-produced for every generation..., the question is, "Do you want to be yourself or find yourself?" Or adopt a mass-produced mask(to fit in smoothly)?, you can convert you image and soul to conveniently fit in for a taxing price...

--Eric J. Brinovec is a 28 year old man from Grants, NM. Eric has been published in Ygdrasil, Poetrywarrior, and Purdee. He loves the Meat Puppets and wants to finally do something with his life and succeed enough to get away from this intellectually dead, western town of zombies...

Prelude to 2012

From Gail Gray's Planetary Tensions:

Prelude to 2012

Transits to acceleration
profound spears
of whacked metronomes
stretch parallels
meant to meet.
The age of reason defunct
beneath the hands of theorists.
Terrorists can’t ignite
such explosions;
deposit such doubt.
Predictors lay down their
tools and watch agape
as rapid cycling
stretches the divine.

--Gail Gray is the author of three books of poetry, The Hazard of Waking Up, Spirals in Copper, and Planetary Tensions with Eye on the Universe upcoming from Differentia Press and Storms at the Edge upcoming from Virgogray Press. She is the owner of Shadow Archer Press and editor of Fissure, a magazine of experimental art and writing. Her poetry has been published or is upcoming in The Asheville Poetry Review, Counterexample Poetics, Cokefish, Exquisite Corpse, Eviscerator Heaven, Being, Big Swollen Toe, Sisyphus, Zygote Abstract Libertine, Gloom Cupboard, Main Street Rag, sein und werden, Clockwise Cat, Shoots and Vines, ditch, Deep Tissue, Troubadour 21, Anastomoo, and Full of Crow.

A Cozy November Day in a Morphine Haze

A Cozy November Day in a Morphine Haze

The rabbits bent towards the flaming carrots running through the wacky-looking tunnel, towards bad smelling light..., Korean soldiers marched solemnly through visions that should have made them smile instinctively, and then they walked through a tear in the fabric of time unwittingly..., established challenges challenged aspiring challenges aspiring to grow established, and flocks of herds of crowds of swarms of schools of fish fleshlessly unembodied, immaterially drifted in packs of dangerously haunting, and stalking non-material manifestations of untouchable consciousness and intangible perceptive manifestations... dark streets brightly lit by shiny radioactive silence barely shined bright..., gelatinous dead talk-show hosts laughed at rubber hammers rowdily smashing into their own imaginary perceptions of gleeful celebrations basted in blood and butter and wrapped in charred tinfoil..., structure seemed quite silly to them since they were genetically accustomed to non-structural freedoms..., any structure no matter how seemingly free, were a categorized limitation..., even upon perception beyond experience, any thought no matter how crude or vague rounds the experiences up into a limitation..., no matter how hard anything tried, they could not dodge limitation and categorization..., I looked for the words I could hear walking on the wind..., I could not for the life of me catch them..., they made the young tornadoes sit in the dusty corner and think about what they did, air should never act out aggressively, only calm airwaves can teach the vast masses..., wobbling scribulations on bobbing tribulations, triggered good-feeling fluctuations in the midst of horrible situations, unintentionally grabbing slabs of neatly sliced, blobs of globular fat cells, McFuckin'-A!..., Extracted by visual curiousity, we always slow down for car crashes..., slashes in bloody gashes flash invisible..., visual gashes affect the horrors I can't see... fuck it...

--Eric J. Brinovec is a 28 year old man from Grants, NM. Eric has been published in Ygdrasil, Poetrywarrior, and Purdee. He loves the Meat Puppets and wants to finally do something with his life and succeed enough to get away from this intellectually dead, western town of zombies...

Calliope Nerve Issue 18 Now Available at Amazon.com

Calliope Nerve XVIII: Democracy Chinese is now available at Amazon. Rate it, review it, wish-list it, buy it, love it.

Tales of the Cold Wars

From Gail Gray's Planetary Tensions:

Tales of the Cold Wars

“Irony appears in the fallow time following
the collapse, before the revolution,” the Hungarian said,
as he downed his Zwack Unicum, the national beverage.
“The Russians redesigned a rich complex culture
to the nature of deprivation. Death by resignation.”

He spoke of how the old guard
armed with passive aggressive behaviors
proved the DSMIIII R wrong.
“Personality disorders are life saving,”
he emphasized by pouring another round.

His friend, a Pestian, slightly lost
outside his Buda, sprinkled
paprika, the national spice, on alternating beers.
“This is how we toast our leaders.”
He hefted his pint to the disenfranchised;

the young, as they thrashed underground,
from Budapest to Prague, the original Bohemia.
Where the dank hand over hand stone walls
bled tears of the Danube and Vltava,
encouraged piercings,

the slick warmth of black leather;
disguise of chameleon tresses.
They buried their heritage,
compost for anger, biding their time.
Such was the Eastern Bloc.
Funny, how the Reedy and Merrimack Rivers
U.S. sisters, smell like
the Vltava and Danube.
Only it didn’t take the Russians
to invade, as we were warned.

Lines and lies bred in the mix…
as with all civilizations. It was only a matter
of time; but who accepts “in my time?”
We’d like to believe the encroachment
imported, cheap and easy like Chinese products,
but this manufacture of “spin” and “omission”
Patriot Acts and Homeland Security bills,
proves bettermade, easier sold and dummer bought…
resilient as no other American product, tough enough
to last until the last collapse.

I slam down another glass.
Kindly pass the paprika.

--Gail Gray is the author of three books of poetry, The Hazard of Waking Up, Spirals in Copper, and Planetary Tensions with Eye on the Universe upcoming from Differentia Press and Storms at the Edge upcoming from Virgogray Press. She is the owner of Shadow Archer Press and editor of Fissure, a magazine of experimental art and writing. Her poetry has been published or is upcoming in The Asheville Poetry Review, Counterexample Poetics, Cokefish, Exquisite Corpse, Eviscerator Heaven, Being, Big Swollen Toe, Sisyphus, Zygote Abstract Libertine, Gloom Cupboard, Main Street Rag, sein und werden, Clockwise Cat, Shoots and Vines, ditch, Deep Tissue, Troubadour 21, Anastomoo, and Full of Crow.

An Interconscious Mixing Bowl of Unknown Ingredients

An Interconscious Mixing Bowl of Unknown Ingredients

Radiative thoughts radiating outwards and travelling through the physical flesh of my metaphysical mind roughed up my genetics and flew outward- forth to the place where young, fresh, travelling ideas tend to seek a venue accessible to the possibility of praised and acknowledged creativity..., A hole in a small-town carwash let the dusted rain interfere, with true cleanliness crippled, physical beings being rained on melted as they innocently tried to trudge through the unmerciful mud..., I breathed in the changing phases, and watched bouncing water molecules hop up and land in a cold steel sink, gravitationally the water returned to the turning functions of burning cosmic rotations moving to the center of our sacred land(Earth)..., vaccum sealed lacerations became their own self-advertised, productive creations..., dreamscapes went unmapped, creating a wild west like phenomena in an undetectable realm of unimagined physics, manifest cancer creation danced and laughed on healthy lives soon to be extinguished by the collossal creational mistake that god embarrassedly turned its back on..., the divine creative force realized it fucked up and created infinite suffering..., but like us all, it needed to keep reaching for excellence..., who can prove advanced divine consciousness is "Perfect"? as they'd have us believe and program us to believe in the unholy houses we call "Churches"...

--Eric J. Brinovec is a 28 year old man from Grants, NM. Eric has been published in Ygdrasil, Poetrywarrior, and Purdee. He loves the Meat Puppets and wants to finally do something with his life and succeed enough to get away from this intellectually dead, western town of zombies...

Lucy Crooked House (The Nobius Tree)

"No one knows how the Princesses leave their rooms at night... Or where they go to dance." --Dungeons & Dragons (Dragonlance)

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God." --The Gospel of John

Lucy Crooked House (The Nobius Tree)

Skin Walk
Crooked House
Of Mists
Holds Soul
Poetry dreams
Lesser Prophets
Mouth

say something beautiful

I feel words.
(tHEM all.)
It's what I do.
Fretful workings
Belong with other men.

wiLL it take us forever?

to transcend
to become script
to morph Spirit
Write God.
Ink will tell.

Started today with ten essential
Vitamins/Minerals
It'd take ten bowls
Of that other kind!
(Wheaties Natural Selection.)

I'm finally buff enough
To get with Lucy Lieu!
I heard it
from you Love...

The sound of
Your heart
brEAKing
& the pruning
of the Nobius Tree.
The star of my own work.

Blood, Milk, and Slivers in my Icecream...

Blood, Milk, and Slivers in my Icecream

You should've considered the unanticipted horrifications during your introspective ramificational searches..., A pair of giant, severed hands juggled three suns in the nighttime sky, while a huge dismembered forearm hammered a nail into the moon..., nightmares in the night sky..., chattering teeth shattered and smashed the tiny particles in between them..., faces folded inward, and skulls expanded outward all while the transparent mushrooms hopped and dance towards the skeletal forest of forgotten pain...

--Eric J. Brinovec is a 28 year old man from Grants, NM. Eric has been published in Ygdrasil, Poetrywarrior, and Purdee. He loves the Meat Puppets and wants to finally do something with his life and succeed enough to get away from this intellectually dead, western town of zombies...

A Classic Vortex of Divine Imagination

A Classic Vortex of Divine Imagination

It is raining sharpened teeth through abrasive clouds of hope..., dreams swirl in the breeze towards a direction(you pick), all flow rolls avariciously, intricate perplexive logic jumped over a forgotten garbage dump filled with buried and ignored prayers..., the layers of decayed prayers stunk of an odor that always presents itself as an infinite variety of disorder..., simple complexity avoided the falling electric shapes, they were too physical for an abstract concept..., swarms of highly aggressive spades travelled north fleeing any thoughts of mercy, they flew towards flesh bound flesh that swiftly and freshly arrived in our mystical, western hell..., some walking legs making fake walking movements slid by the real reality, imitating unimagined imagination..., electronic sheets of paper quickly circled the vortex of divinity, dodging the stars and random metal scrap, navigationally, they mastered movement in all directions... all things accelerated promptly...

--Eric J. Brinovec is a 28 year old man from Grants, NM. Eric has been published in Ygdrasil, Poetrywarrior, and Purdee. He loves the Meat Puppets and wants to finally do something with his life and succeed enough to get away from this intellectually dead, western town of zombies...

The Hallway

The Hallway

Arched in the hallway
she leaned crystal
until we found new faces.
Dawn came from the hills
onto the lawn
and we listened to birds
and talked about sisters.
Hers has an imaginary
blue jay for a friend.
We were far from the party
in the next room,
she touched my hair
and I wanted to kiss her,
her fierce calm bestowed
understanding and armor.
She is so far,
she is my friend's girl.
I slept in a hole
in the floor
and always wake there.

--John Swain lives in Louisville, Kentucky. His work has appeared in Flutter, ditch, Gloom Cupboard, Counterexample Poetics, Rust and Moth, Word Catalyst Magazine and others.

Redival's Betrayal

Redival's Betrayal

Acquisition began the collection,
The Story kept the time,
While the questions were arriving at their problems,
The idiot pointed at me.

Then the card houses were murdered,
The pockets robbed the person,
Though August presented the humidity,
I swore I’d get back on that road.

That idiot goddess
Biting her lip
Kept the situation dark
And the good Lord took His time imagining up the treatment

It was all quietly public
When they waited in their reluctance
In the meantime, I bested that idiot
And broke boundaries and anyone else present

The good Lord frowned on me.
His eyes on me, more curious than upset.
My options were taken,
And He too was persuaded
That off the hook was the best place to start.

So privately we promised not to remember
While the trees policed the sun,
And catalogue paced the sales,
The problems made the appreciation.

--Onyinye Alexis Okosa was born to Pete and Obianuju Okosa on Friday the 13th of July in 1990. She grew up in West Orange, NJ as the youngest and only girl of four children. Onyinye had a love for art from a young age, primarily through drawing. By the time she graduated high school, the walls of her room were covered in Bible verses and washable marker portraits. There aren't any areas of her life that are not directly affected by her relationship with God. According to her, "Whether a person realizes where the art originates or not, that art is closest anyone can come to communicating their own encounters with God." So she writes, draws, scribbles, and doodles today.

Bazooka Joe

Gabcast! White Rabbit - *BLACK HOLE* #10



"Mockingbird, wish me luck." --Charles Bukowski

"If I am exempt from one thing as an artist, surely it is knowing what my government is doing." --Cerdwen Dovey

Bazooka Joe

Truly, Truly,
I say to you:
A comic in ever piece.

No words for
far too long.
Punch drunk now.
(Alcohol induced
horizon event.)
Brain pull/
not even -Light from on High-
Escapes.

More whiskey!
Puritanical Bukowski
--that Spontaneous bastard--
Make me wanna combust.
Let's burn together!

SiMULACRA:
A likeness; a semblance; a mock appearance; a sham;
-- now usually in a derogatory sense.

My ink brother:
I copy/clone DNA.
(never be You.)

pail

only
a Scar on a Stage,
momentary Pop star...
Prima donna poet Joe
Questing for immortality.
The internet changed everything.

I like to blow
pretty pink bubbles
before the taste
wears out.

The Shadow Fair

The Shadow Fair

At the shadow fair
banners cut the air like blue-silver
scarves you wore like a winter.
This schism perfected,
I will live between the walls,
it is lonely,
but I am breathing
and I have a pocketful of tokens
for the next ride
on parade horses.
A circle of candles
lights goldfish in milk bottles,
I yelled out in anger
when I won
but was cheated.
You were embarrassed
and were gone.
Melted icicles drip like taut ropes
holding up the circus tent.

--John Swain lives in Louisville, Kentucky. His work has appeared in Flutter, ditch, Gloom Cupboard, Counterexample Poetics, Rust and Moth, Word Catalyst Magazine and others.

Seven Days, Seven Souls

"And who shall answer a Sinner's Prayer?" --The Untamed: A Sinner's Prayer #1



Is it far?

As far as everywhere else.

Watch the preview then read the interview about Sebastian Jones' new comic company.

Why Super Powers Can Be Useful

Why Super Powers Can Be Useful

If I could have any super power I’d want to run as far as wanted a fast as wanted and never get tired.

I’m not interested in flying through clouds, stopping bullets with my chest, shooting energy blast from my wrists

No, nothing flashy for me.

I don’t even wanna run on water or get any more benefits than sleeping in later and still getting to class on time.

I guess its selfish not to think of using my gifts to save the world or fight crime, but there’s something that has been on mind for years now that I’d like get cleared.

What I would do with my super speed is wait for the first wind to come my way and chase it where ever it may go.

People have always had questions they’d like to ask God about where we come from or why we’re here.

Those questions, I’m sure, all have interesting enough answers, but I’ve always been concerned about the wind’s got to say.

Where does it come from? Where’s it heading? When was born?

Does it ever get tired of blowing the way I used to get tired of running?

If so, does it sit down and take a break as still air and catch on to some small breeze later to continue its journeys?

Or does it simply die, and is the air we breathe the corpses of this wind’s fallen brothers?

Does it ever stop?

If it doesn’t, have I met this wind before, maybe when I was younger and before it had made its 12th trip across the pacific where it finally blew past the mountains of Thailand before gliding over the Khorat Plateau for the 3rd time?

Has it ever been a part of a wind so great and terrible causing destruction in its path, committing sins against man and nature?

Did it get estranged from that wind for faltering in battle or did simply run into a building and get left behind?

Maybe I haven’t thought this all the way through and maybe the gift of talking to the wind be better for getting my answers?

No, I have thought this through for many years I said already.

What use is speaking with winds you can’t keep up with them long enough to hear the whole answer?

If I could chase them without stopping, around the globe, we’d never need to speak a word and following; its trail would reveal its secrets.

--Onyinye Alexis Okosa was born to Pete and Obianuju Okosa on Friday the 13th of July in 1990.She grew up in West Orange, NJ as the youngest and only girl of four children. Onyinye had a love for art from a young age, primarily through drawing. By the time she graduated high school, the walls of her room were covered in Bible verses and washable marker portraits. There aren't any areas of her life that are not directly affected by her relationship with God. According to her, "Whether a person realizes where the art originates or not, that art is closest anyone can come to communicating their own encounters with God." So she writes, draws, scribbles, and doodles today.

SAME-HEX

SAME-HEX

I've configured a cot over your fire, and
I'm getting close to its memory.
From green grass to brown,
We kiss like
Top hats instead of heads, like
Grammy nods instead of meds.
If sock puppets without eyes see us in a mirror,
We're perfect.

--RC Miller currently lives in Metuchen, New Jersey and at http://visionblues.blogspot.com/.

The Future of Reading: Mag+

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

I know this has floated around the Internet for a few days now. Tech that's just just around the corner...

"We’ve been working with our friends at Bonnier R&D exploring the future of digital magazines. Bonnier publish Popular Science and many other titles.

Magazines have articles you can curl up with and lose yourself in, and luscious photography that draws the eye. And they’re so easy and enjoyable to read. Can we marry what’s best about magazines with the always connected, portable tablet e-readers sure to arrive in 2010?"

Is this the future of reading? What say you?

THE SIDE OF THE ROAD

THE SIDE OF THE ROAD

All of the people
were on the side of the road that I didn’t want them to be on.
I was hoping that they would be
on the side where it would be easier to listen to my excuses.
And easier to see that my dunce cap
was something I could always reclaim without having to answer additional arguments.
I was hoping that, if I asked them to move to the other side of the road,
the sparrows they were looking after wouldn’t land on my plate.
But, after finishing my meal for me,
would draw beads from a sky
that was colored with the sounds of the eagle in my hand.

--Lee Stern lives in Los Angeles. He is aging gracefully.

MAYBE MY POND

MAYBE MY POND

Maybe my pond was filling up with pennies
and I didn’t even know it.
Maybe I should have been told
so I wouldn’t have to go from one city to the next
trying to find out what was going on.
And maybe the people who were throwing the pennies in my pond
were dressed in strange uniforms and were wearing
shirts that didn’t tuck in properly.
Maybe their knees buckled
when they realized they might have to walk into the water,
pick up the pennies and start over again,
rolling into fragments,
saying little words to themselves that couldn’t be repeated in the night.

--Lee Stern lives in Los Angeles. He is aging gracefully.

Quoteable

"And I smile a skull at you." --Alice In Chains

The Future of Reading: E-Comics

Online comics have come along way.

I've posted this link not because of the content of the comic but because of the delivery system Marvel comics is using. It's not a real comic but it feels as close to one as I've ever seen in the digital world. As people come to expect all information and entertainment to be portable, it'll be interesting to see how publisher's evolve and adapt.

Big changes are clearly already in play.

Is this the future of reading? What say you?

The Woman on the Bus

The Woman on the Bus

The woman
with straw yellow hair
(the sort that begs for a brush) –
sits down beside me
and my world gets smaller.

She begins:
her first husband,
her second mother-in-law,
her terrible PMS,

then, it's her father --
never loved her
quite enough,
too critical,
and distant
in that way dads can be.

Her shrill voice
like a spoon scraping
a metal bowl –
so many towns left
and greyhounds can be so slow.

I imagine freedom
and it feels like a rage
of wild, wild wind
tangling my hair
in a red Mustang convertible.

--Amy Corbin has been published in Filling Station, The Cynic, Ascent Aspirations, Shine, Every Day Poets, Every Day Fiction, Haruah: A Breath of Heaven, Ignavia Press, Flask and Pen, The Battered Suitcase, Flashes in the Dark, Short Story Library, Smokebox, Wanderings, Writers' Stories, The New Flesh, and Boston Literary Magazine.

Me and You

Me and You

thunderstorms
sun
flowers
years
seasons
and time
everything in between
then there will be me and you

--Amy Corbin has been published in Filling Station, The Cynic, Ascent Aspirations, Shine, Every Day Poets, Every Day Fiction, Haruah: A Breath of Heaven, Ignavia Press, Flask and Pen, The Battered Suitcase, Flashes in the Dark, Short Story Library, Smokebox, Wanderings, Writers' Stories, The New Flesh, and Boston Literary Magazine.

Untitled

my brain
is s.... c
........... att
er.................... ed
everything done
ha..... lf..... as... s
............... ed
all al(one)
in room 206
the woman’s hushed screams
echo through the wall
the relentless replay
in my mind
drives me
m.....a......d
and then I hear her soft sighs
and I want to be in that room
to be her
just
once

--Amy Corbin has been published in Filling Station, The Cynic, Ascent Aspirations, Shine, Every Day Poets, Every Day Fiction, Haruah: A Breath of Heaven, Ignavia Press, Flask and Pen, The Battered Suitcase, Flashes in the Dark, Short Story Library, Smokebox, Wanderings, Writers' Stories, The New Flesh, and Boston Literary Magazine.

Gidget

Gidget

Gidget had to stay after school. Didn’t
follow the rules; she talked out of turn.
I waited in the hall, leaned my face
on the concrete wall. I peered in,
saw her Pit Bull stare not care,
but once outside she cried those tears
that just won’t stop, the kind that upset
her breath and hurt my ears – even now.

--Amy Corbin has been published in Filling Station, The Cynic, Ascent Aspirations, Shine, Every Day Poets, Every Day Fiction, Haruah: A Breath of Heaven, Ignavia Press, Flask and Pen, The Battered Suitcase, Flashes in the Dark, Short Story Library, Smokebox, Wanderings, Writers' Stories, The New Flesh, and Boston Literary Magazine.

THE COST OF THE METAL

THE COST OF THE METAL

When people ask me these days what the cost of the metal is,
I don’t have a built-in clock to understand their motives.
So I have to rely on their generosity
and the demands superimposed on the inflections of their distant voice.
If I am alarmed by anything,
it is by the different tissues in their hands with which they wipe their eyes.
And by the velocity
with which I try to give them the keys to everything I own.
And it’s true that I’ve gone out of my way for them at times.
But I don’t consider myself to be their designated helper.
Or to consider that it’s a good thing
either to know what their sunrises are like
or if the cost of the metal is like a portion of gravy to them.
When I whistle, however,
I do know unquestionably that their eyes follow me.
And that it is the width of the birds’ wings on laminated ivory
that gets them through the holes in their day.

--Lee Stern lives in Los Angeles. He is aging gracefully.

A Moment in Time

A Moment in Time

I replay the moment
over and over,
rewind, stop, play.
The ribbon wears thin
as memory fades,
blends with all the others.

Mesh of flesh,
with a pastel smear
of blue-green eyes,
and his hands
are a blotch of blur.
I scrunch my eyes tight,
try to remember
each long finger.

Then I hear a voice
whisper in my ear,
“It doesn’t matter.”
And I know.

--Amy Corbin has been published in Filling Station, The Cynic, Ascent Aspirations, Shine, Every Day Poets, Every Day Fiction, Haruah: A Breath of Heaven, Ignavia Press, Flask and Pen, The Battered Suitcase, Flashes in the Dark, Short Story Library, Smokebox, Wanderings, Writers' Stories, The New Flesh, and Boston Literary Magazine.

WHO COMES THIS WAY

WHO COMES THIS WAY

Say hello to every soldier who comes this way.
And ask him if he intends to be viewing himself
with the mirrors he has just withdrawn from your case.
Point with your good hand
in the direction in which the sun is actually rising
and show him that it’s just as nearly as round as he was taught.
And don’t be afraid to ask him what time it is,
if he has a clock on his shoulder similar to yours.
Don’t be afraid either to point at the clock
or to place a stone inside of it
that you may have drawn in stages from the depths of an unruly creek.
And, please, remember, when it comes to giving him your advice,
to give him the advice that you learned when you were a youngster,
but to omit any of the information that was gleaned haphazardly.
And consider telling him, if he asks you about the relics you are unearthing,
that your shovel was purchased with the grain that you sprinkled from the sky.

--Lee Stern lives in Los Angeles. He is aging gracefully.

DECENCY

DECENCY

I'm determined to be a tiki goddamit.
The real news, though, is that my balls protest such transformation
Fast and feisty.
But I'm determined to be a wad of no special distinction.
Resourceful tenant of the rosy-cheeked, as
Perplexed as a rhinestone butterfly.

I'm following my every move, anticipating the most technological.
The real news, though, is that the reason I take up physical space
Is to create a flatbread.
If there's something retailers like it's sexual ambiguity
Because of unity.
Brings me as whore to a successful conclusion.

I'm determined to be on ice for the remainder of my program.
Knowing this is the ultimate goal makes life
A brown fur shoulder bag.
I watch the tree grow hard for me.
Puffer fish replace my balls so their absence gets sold.
Happy little feces play word games and read.

--RC Miller currently lives in Metuchen, New Jersey and at http://visionblues.blogspot.com/.

Shallow

Shallow

Impoverished children
on the Unicef commercial --
flies flit
from distended bellies
to dirty water.

Senseless suffering --
a cancer that eats away
rainbow palms
of benevolent workers
at the United Way.

And all the while,
I wile away hours upon days,
contemplating the crisscross
of my calves
behind his broad back.

--Amy Corbin has been published in Filling Station, The Cynic, Ascent Aspirations, Shine, Every Day Poets, Every Day Fiction, Haruah: A Breath of Heaven, Ignavia Press, Flask and Pen, The Battered Suitcase, Flashes in the Dark, Short Story Library, Smokebox, Wanderings, Writers' Stories, The New Flesh, and Boston Literary Magazine.

Join In

Join In

                                       
Lines of white, in between
the nerfhurddlers of Missouri,

Go pee, we got the time.
the coliseum is miles from here,

See the insects score one more.
This time they’re supposed to bring chips with dip, 
      plus the drunken Mel Torme on their shoulders.

Funny little guy he is;
   Singin’ like Fitzgerald, kicking like Hines,
           so distracted, like Bush visiting a puppet show,
   or Chong in a Home Depot.

Giggle some, I did.

--Peter B. Gagne is a fine arts major Attending Nhia in New Hampshire. his works of art have been displayed in galleries in Oregon, New Hampshire and Washington state. Currently seeking a teaching degree, he prefers all types of art: from the written word to the visual expression.

Her cycle and her end

Her cycle and her end

Shine over the mighty pines resplendent miss
Crepuscular segments stirs life
She walks amidst flora and windy kiss
Her head, a daffodil tiara enshrines

And when tides change she wears a gown
Made of magnificent seasonal goods
Now powder snow white before brown
Elegant, she is striding through the woods

But lo! Unknown beasts setting snares
Egocentric cycle is born
No one any longer cares
Thus, from this world she is torn

--Kim Andre Sandum lives in Trondheim, Norway. He is studying literature at the Norwegian University Of Technology And Science. He is drawn to the twisted and bizzare.

TOPPED WITH SLICED

TOPPED WITH SLICED

Dogs in a stroller, nobody
Hates the other.
Pride is my pearl necklace of
Penniless humor or suicide.
I'm author of applicator onto tube, a
Stranger strangely born by art and flatulence.
Machines donate the poor and needy
Beast outgrowing its bond.
I hunt it, I eat it, I make a bag
For crews to check the label.

--RC Miller currently lives in Metuchen, New Jersey and at http://visionblues.blogspot.com/.

Second Sight

Second Sight

My eyes were clearer then
or were they always so discolored?

Like one color eating the other
brown eating the green
because simple blue had grown too obscene.

I have a history of repetition and spiked rendition
I am only acting for myself
so be forewarned of my second sight
I see things others might.

I record my hallucinations
many find too maiming
but I do not need restraining.

I want to know if my eyes always looked like this?
You probably don’t remember
or don’t want to.

But you were the first one who looked
at me the way I wanted.

You were the first one
who pointed out my eyes were different.

Unfortunately the rest of me
wasn’t different enough to create a history.

-Andrea DeAngelis is at times a poet, writer, shutterbug and musician. Her writing has recently appeared in Ginosko Literary Journal, Bolts of Silk, Word Riot, Denver Syntax, Galleys Online, and Writers Bloc. Andrea also sings and plays guitar in an indie rock band called MAKAR.

Winter Lust

Winter Lust

I

Smooth goddess slinks in
cups her many hands
in-between gawking men’s thighs

Smooth goddess blows in
roughing up a Hoboken bar
uninvited but wished for

Smooth goddess beckons
to the catatonic men
to look, look at me

To look is to want
to want is not to have
to have is not to want
and to not be wanted
is to be invisible
and perfectly miserable.


II

Smooth goddess
blue breasted
delirious will
smear milk
chant woman drunk
drunk woman chant
belly roar

Chocolate fingered friend
slips his eyes sideways wise
to catch a nip of her
and her sordid dress
red as tongue whispers
skin as white as frantic moths

This bar smells of
iron sweat and delicate men
she stares at them
to lather up
the gorgeous worship
of rusted suits and foreclosed mouths.

--Andrea DeAngelis is at times a poet, writer, shutterbug and musician. Her writing has recently appeared in Ginosko Literary Journal, Bolts of Silk, Word Riot, Denver Syntax, Galleys Online, and Writers Bloc. Andrea also sings and plays guitar in an indie rock band called MAKAR.

At 3rd and Arch Street

At 3rd and Arch Street

A fat woman in pink stretch pants
sits on a bench in front of the Sea-men's Church.

Trucks stir heated air.

It's that time of day when patches
of sunlight form on brick buildings-
somehow sad; not me, but the light
is sad. Well, maybe we both are down.

That kind of separation is difficult
for me; and I'm thinking a lot
about someone else- not me.

There's no explanation I can give:

Tired of this street and love;
which may be the same; or
maybe the sunlight is sad.

I don't know much,
wind moves leaves in trees
and the fat woman in pink
stretch pants is happy;

or is it me?

--Joseph Hargraves has been published in or will be in the Guardian UK, The South African Times, The New York Quarterly, Black-Listed Magazine, Gutter Eloquence, Opium 2.0, Full of Crow.Gutter Eloquence Magazine, Zygote in my Coffee, Right Hand Pointing, and Haggard & Halloo. He has taught poetry to men as a condition of their parole from prison and taught writing poetry to small groups of people diagnosed as "chronically-mentally ill." He is currently a charismatic hermit living in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.

Pleasant View Cemetery

Pleasant View Cemetery

the only human contact
I’m comfortable with
is walking at night
in the cemetery:

tombstones glow
the light from the moon
which reflects the sun-

nothing is ever simple.

when I need
to be among the living
I stand on top of the dead.

--Joseph Hargraves has been published in or will be in the Guardian UK, The South African Times, The New York Quarterly, Black-Listed Magazine, Gutter Eloquence, Opium 2.0, Full of Crow.Gutter Eloquence Magazine, Zygote in my Coffee, Right Hand Pointing, and Haggard & Halloo. He has taught poetry to men as a condition of their parole from prison and taught writing poetry to small groups of people diagnosed as "chronically-mentally ill." He is currently a charismatic hermit living in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.

Ray

Ray

His lips move
in the past
and are greased
for the winter
refusing to listen
they live
rent free and
can only talk
about themselves.

--Joseph Hargraves has been published in or will be in the Guardian UK, The South African Times, The New York Quarterly, Black-Listed Magazine, Gutter Eloquence, Opium 2.0, Full of Crow.Gutter Eloquence Magazine, Zygote in my Coffee, Right Hand Pointing, and Haggard & Halloo. He has taught poetry to men as a condition of their parole from prison and taught writing poetry to small groups of people diagnosed as "chronically-mentally ill." He is currently a charismatic hermit living in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.

I Have a Genius IQ

I Have a Genius IQ

I Have a Genius IQ
and I need to tell you that.
The entire time you've been talking
I've wanted to let you know that I'm a genius.
And I have common sense too.
The myth that smart people don't
is promoted by average minded people
to help them live with themselves.
I know you're going to say tests mean nothing;
But if you had an IQ of 165+
I bet it would mean more.
Be honest. It's alright.
Tell me you're jealous.
Ask me a question.
I am not a know it all.
There is plenty I don't know.
That's a difference between us:
I'm tortured by how much I don't know
and you're content with the little you do.
But I want you to like me,
even though I don't like you.
I can tell your intelligence is not
in the highest category measurable
on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.
I know you're telling yourself that I have problems,
that my self-worth is based on a number.
You've never liked brilliant people,
they've always made you feel stupid.
Speaking for geniuses everywhere:
we can't make you feel anything.
I bet you're thinking my feelings have atrophied.
Think again, asshole.
Can't you hear the anger?
I'm a proud,
four-eyed,
egg-headed
bookworm.
Why am I not letting you talk?
Because you bore me.
Get back here, I'm talking.
I need to tell you
that I have a genius IQ.

--Joseph Hargraves has been published in or will be in the Guardian UK, The South African Times, The New York Quarterly, Black-Listed Magazine, Gutter Eloquence, Opium 2.0, Full of Crow.Gutter Eloquence Magazine, Zygote in my Coffee, Right Hand Pointing, and Haggard & Halloo. He has taught poetry to men as a condition of their parole from prison and taught writing poetry to small groups of people diagnosed as "chronically-mentally ill." He is currently a charismatic hermit living in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.

Quoteable

"What happened to the land?
Metal fused with stone
Nothing remains, nothing lives
Burned through the bone

The sun touched the earth somehow, life melts away
One city barren wasteland, a split-second blaze.
The heat turned the men to shadows, the sand into glass." --Metal Church

Painters’ Exhalations 743

Painters’ Exhalations 743

—after John Atta Mensah’s Waiting

Why the wait little ones? Young girl
your contoured earrings’
shine of mirroring sadness, naturalized
depiction. Your underdeveloped hands
holding wicker of purposeful basket,
—what’s within? Did
you place mother’s turned back
inside crisscrossed hand-loved
product of this basket’s many
purposes?

Young girl, is your sibling
saddened with the outbreak of silent
creation? Her face
found shadow of October wings
fluttering on plastered, alabaster wall
behind your brand of duo lingering.
When did your bodies become
juxtaposed wants of calling toward
clearness? Perhaps
soon, return will arrive in contoured
science, revealing new facets of facial
identity, burgeoning into smiling abstracts
of subjective fondness.

--Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974, California) is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He edits/publishes Counterexample Poetics, www.counterexamplepoetics.com, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of experimental poetry. As a poet, he has authored ten collections of poetry, including Among the Interrogated (BlazeVOX [books], 2008), Search among the Absent Found (Recycled Karma Press, 2009), Apperceptions of Reinterpretations (Calliope Nerve Media, 2009)and r (please press, 2009). The internal collocation of philosophical studies and love of classic and avant-garde jazz is the explanation for his poetic stimulation. Details are at his website, www.felinosoriano.com.

Whinny and Spit

Whinny and Spit

When a man's young,
the work's hard
but it pays well
and he can feed
the wife and kids.

Mornings he throws
crates off trucks,
and after lunch he
throws crates again.
But as he grows older,

and some say
ready to retire,
he stops
in mid-afternoon,
mounts his throne

of skids, lets
his legs drip
over the side,
tosses his head,
whinnies and spits.

--Donal Mahoney, a native of Chicago, lives in St. Louis, MO. He has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press and Washington University in St. Louis. He has had poems published in or accepted by The Wisconsin Review, The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Commonweal, Calliope Nerve, Public Republic (Bulgaria), Avocet Review, Revival (Ireland), The Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey), Poetry Friends, Poetry Super Highway, Pirene's Fountain (Australia) and other publications.

Hard Candy

Hard Candy

Silly songs
of black birds
bellowing
in the dark

nesting in
the sky
that opens
like a can
of extra
chunky soup

rain slaps
the streets
bouncing
off trees

cars stop
putting on
their floods

clearing
the roads
making
way for
bikes
that ride

down by
the river
bank
late at
night

where
people
swim
without safety
jackets
choking on
Life Savers.

--Drew DeGennaro attends Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is studying creative writing. Drew has been published in Haggard and Halloo.com, Writers Bloc Magazine and Word Riot.

Painters’ Exhalations 742

Painters’ Exhalations 742

—after Mohammad Arifin’s Vase

Brown bark body
sans gnarled texture
of fingerprint diversity. Three
mouths in morning dialog, perfuming
context of moving minutes’
grandiose elaboration. Three
red wives tonguing devotion,
still-standing in leaning culture
of the flower’s natural transfer.
Body of vase, elder to the new wives
of every 10 days, counter-supporting
love of mans’ denied attribution
as in the metaphor of love denied
in context of misunderstood
cultivated nuances.

--Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974, California) is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He edits/publishes Counterexample Poetics, www.counterexamplepoetics.com, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of experimental poetry. As a poet, he has authored ten collections of poetry, including Among the Interrogated (BlazeVOX [books], 2008), Search among the Absent Found (Recycled Karma Press, 2009), Apperceptions of Reinterpretations (Calliope Nerve Media, 2009)and r (please press, 2009). The internal collocation of philosophical studies and love of classic and avant-garde jazz is the explanation for his poetic stimulation. Details are at his website, www.felinosoriano.com.

Quoteable

"Nothing is so common place as to wish to be remarkable." --Shakespeare

THE KING OF BEVERAGES

THE KING OF BEVERAGES

The king of beverages must be married to someone.
And if we put our heads together long enough,
maybe we can find out who she is.
Maybe she’ll turn out to be a simple girl from the country.
Someone who gave you rowing lessons when there wasn’t even a need for them,
someone who gave birth to your children
when there wasn’t a table on which to place the instructions.
And though I’m not going to put any money on this,
let it be said gently nevertheless what I truly believe,
that whoever is married to the king of beverages
will be the first one in a line of greater anecdotes.
Let him who is only now in front of me
before this happens compile them
and tell my protectors on a road where there are many different brides
to bring justice to their beginnings
in a well-lit fashion by the mountain of the infant born to suck.

--Lee Stern lives in Los Angeles. He is aging gracefully.

a harmonic deluge

a harmonic deluge

words pour forth from nimble
fingers pitting the page with
mathematical waves dancing Ichthys
at periodic intervals
torrent me with action verbs announcing
a melody in heat
timbre me with your cosines and your
Pythagorean colors
submerge me in your saltine waves where
whales play hide and seek using
the slow beat flow of echolocation
a kind of Beethovian symphony where
flotsam conducts and
time exists only in the divergence of
oceanic crust
it’s dark down there where jetsam
treasures lie under layers of
shipwrecked sediment
push me further into your subterranean depths
where the pressure to fit in gets stronger
the deeper you go
lick me like the wind barrels your skin
haunt me with your tacit rhythms then
spit me out when i can no longer bear
to hold my breath

--Jacqueline Young enjoys photo booths and sneaking into movie theaters. She misses the San Francisco fog yet is enjoying herself in the warm waters of Southern California. Her pug’s name is Nietzsche.

Quoteable

"Eclecticism is a great liberator." --Amy Daczyn

Quoteable

"The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts: monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead." --Clarence Day

Painters’ Exhalations 734

Painters’ Exhalations 734

—after Anita Singh’s Corner

Common for the walker,
finding angles of specialized
moments, architecture of teeming
algebra. Corner symptoms, overdone
cliché of sellable disasters, too
of the crime symbol:

face covered by cloth hands
running from devotion to undertaking
scam, delirious wonder of superlative
recollection of the devious
preconception.

--Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974, California) is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He edits/publishes Counterexample Poetics, www.counterexamplepoetics.com, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of experimental poetry. As a poet, he has authored ten collections of poetry, including Among the Interrogated (BlazeVOX [books], 2008), Search among the Absent Found (Recycled Karma Press, 2009), Apperceptions of Reinterpretations (Calliope Nerve Media, 2009)and r (please press, 2009). The internal collocation of philosophical studies and love of classic and avant-garde jazz is the explanation for his poetic stimulation. Details are at his website, www.felinosoriano.com.

Painters’ Exhalations 733

Painters’ Exhalations 733

—after Prince Asher’s Steps

Always
is the corporeal ensue: body surplus
dexterity in canalled thoughts,
spatial signature of invisible
texture. Leading up
or toward the counting of backwards,
bona fide ritual watching man
escape into distance’s allegorical
contraption.

--Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974, California) is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He edits/publishes Counterexample Poetics, www.counterexamplepoetics.com, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of experimental poetry. As a poet, he has authored ten collections of poetry, including Among the Interrogated (BlazeVOX [books], 2008), Search among the Absent Found (Recycled Karma Press, 2009), Apperceptions of Reinterpretations (Calliope Nerve Media, 2009)and r (please press, 2009). The internal collocation of philosophical studies and love of classic and avant-garde jazz is the explanation for his poetic stimulation. Details are at his website, www.felinosoriano.com.